TY - JOUR AB - Despite the apparent orientation of the world economy and markets towards globalisation, it is obvious that this process is dominated by trends of regionalisation and big economic blocs. Needless to say that this inclination towards groupings is dictated by the fierce competition at the world scale, economically and politically. Almost all of these economic blocs group countries with a lot of similarities in their socio‐economic and political structures as well as cultural set‐ups, geographical proximity and apparent vested mutual interests. An immediate question which comes to the mind when one thinks of the Islamic Common Market (ICM), where there is supposed to be free flow of products, capital, entrepreneurship, labour and technology among the members, as well as a common tariff wall against third parties, is whether the Islamic countries qualify for these criteria or not. The Islamic countries are known to be a diverse group in terms of their economic structures and levels of development, political systems, ethnic backgrounds, as well as a diversified social cultural milieu, although most of them draw on a common source, Islam. This heterogeneity has often been taken as the major argument against the feasibility of an ICM. However, we believe that although this heterogeneity creates a lot of problems, it is also a source of strength if it is positively thought of in terms of diversity and is carefully manipulated. VL - 14 IS - 4 SN - 0828-8666 DO - 10.1108/eb018818 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/eb018818 AU - Zeinelabdin A. AU - Ugurel Ilhan PY - 1998 Y1 - 1998/01/01 TI - THE ISLAMIC COMMON MARKET: IS IT ECONOMICALLY AND POLITICALLY JUSTIFIABLE? T2 - Humanomics PB - MCB UP Ltd SP - 79 EP - 117 Y2 - 2024/04/25 ER -